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Opening with a powerful and tender ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds uses this age-old poetic form to address many aspects of herself, in a collection that is centred around the female body and female pleasures, and touches along the way on parts of her own story which will be familiar from earlier works, each episode and memory now burnished by the wisdom and grace of looking back. In such poems as ‘Ode to My Sister’, ‘Ode of Broken Loyalty’, ‘Ode to My Whiteness’, ‘Blow Job Ode’, ‘Ode to the Last 38 Trees in New York City Visible from This Window’, Olds treats us to an intimate self-examination that, like all her work, is universal and by turns searing and charming in its honesty. From the early bodily joys and sorrows of her girlhood to the recent deaths of those dearest to her – the ‘Sheffield Mountain Ode’ for Galway Kinnell is one of the most stunning pieces here – Olds shapes her world in language that is startlingly fresh, profound in its conclusions, and life-giving for the reader.
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, educated at Stanford and Columbia universities, and has lived for numerous years in New York City. Her books have won many awards over the years. Her last collection, Stag’s Leap, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.
The Sign of Saturn: Poems 1980–87
The Father
The Wellspring
Blood, Tin, Straw
The Unswept Room
Selected Poems
One Secret Thing
Stag’s Leap
for Carl
I don’t know when you came into being,
inside me, when I was inside my mother –
maybe when the involuntary
muscles were setting, like rose jello.
I love to think of you then, so whole, so
impervious, you and the clitoris as
safe as the lives in which you were housed, they would have
had to kill both my mother and me
to get at either of you. I love her, at this
moment, as the big fortress around me, the
matronhead around the sweetmeat
of my maidenhead. I don’t know who
invented you – to keep a girl’s inwards
clean and well-cupboarded. Dear wall,
dear gate, dear stile, dear Dutch door, not a
cat-flap nor a swinging door
but a one-time piñata. How many places in the
body were made to be destroyed
once? You were very sturdy, weren’t you,
you took your job seriously – I’d never
felt such pain – you were the hourglass lady
the magician saws in two. I was proud of you,
turning to a cupful of the bright arterial
ingredient. And how lucky we were,
you and I, that we got to choose
when, and with whom, and where, and why – plush
pincushion, somehow related
to statues that wept. It happened on the rug
of a borrowed living room, but I felt
as if we were in Diana’s woods –
he, and I, and you, together,
or as if we were where the magma from the core of the
earth burst up through the floor of the sea.
Thank you for your life and death,
thank you for your flower-girl walk
before me, throwing down your scarlet
petals. It would be years before
I married – years before I carried, within me,
a tiny, baby hymen, near the
eggs with other teentsy hymens
within them – but you unscrolled the carpet,
leading me into the animal life
of a woman. You were a sort of blood
mother to me: first you held me
close, for eighteen years, and then
you let me go.
Little eagerness;
flower-girl basket of soft thorn
and petal, near the entry of the satin
column of the inner aisle;
scout in the wilderness; wild ear
which perks up; tender dowser, which points;
imp; shape-shifter; bench-pressing biceps of a
teeny goddess who is buff; lotus
for grief; weentsy Minerva who springs
full-armored, molten – I did not know you,
at seven, I thought you were God’s way
of addressing me, when I kept swinging
on the rings, after the bell had rung . . .
He didn’t use his words, he used
you to get my attention, he wrenched me
and wrenched me, then, in six or seven
wrenches of my body and brain, you
the living wrench which winched the wrenches.
Later, you would do that without God –
with boys, with kisses, and later you’d become
an instrument of love’s music. Today,
I saw your portrait for the first time, your
dorsal vein, your artery, your
cavernous body, your vestibular bulb,
your suspensory ligament – and I
could see how evolution got
the idea from you, to invent an organ
something like you but a lot bigger.
You were named for a Greek hill, klinein,
a slope – you are the ground of our being, the tiny
figure of the human, the hooded stranger who
comes to the door, and if we bless her we will be blessed.
Someone told me that what I write
about men is objectifying. So I ask you,
O general idea of the penis, do you mind
being noticed? You who stand, in the mind –
erect and not, old and young –
for all your representations, O abstract
principle, haven’t you maybe been
waiting for your turn to be praised? I think
you’re lovely and brave, and so interesting, you are
like a creature, with your head, and trunk,
as if you have a life of your own. But you are
innocent, you are not your own man,
you are no more responsible for your actions
than the matter of the brain for its thoughts. And you’ve had a mixed
history – you’ve been taken into
carnage, as the instrument
of it, and you yourself have been played
to produce the desperate screams. Often
you have not been protected, nor used to protect,
and oft not been respected, nor wielded
to respect. And yet most of your history
has been spent in joy. And I wonder how it
has felt, being so adored as you have been,
and feared. And what is it like, for you – if you could
look down, from your Platonic cloud
of categories – when two of you
are engaged together, or married – yourself
primed, yourself to your own power?
And being a concept, are you smart, do you know
you’re equal to your sister concept,
and even that you came from her,
back at the invention of the separate male –
the ovaries heavying down toward the earth,
the organ of orgasm growing and growing.
I cannot imagine you, from within – but as a
sage said of a god, I do not want
to be sugar, I want to taste sugar!
But that’s just my heteromania talking,
and you’re not homo or hetero – or visible
or manifest, you do not exist
except as an imaginary quorum
of all your instances. So I’m not
flirting with you, I’m just saying
I like you – not as an object but
a subject, a prime mover, a working
theory of plumbing and ecstasy,
a boy’s pride and anxiety,
wind sock of zephyr and gale, half
of the equation of creation.
I want to go back to that day, when it
was broken in me, the loyalty
to family, when I was cut free,
or cut myself free, from the fully human,
and floated off, like an astronaut
untethered. I want to go back to the hour
some cord in my mind was cut, and I no longer
was fed by the placenta of the nuclear
or extended family, but aborted
myself or was aborted from that house. Once torn
away, once shunned and shunning, it seemed there was
little I could not write about, I felt
as if my disenfranchisement
had been undone, I was out on the wind, like a
spinster alone in orgasm,
like a witch, but I thought I was thinking and trilling
for everyone, in every land
and time. I was insane. Was I insane? I thought
that someone driven out beyond the silence
of normal reticence could speak
for the normal. I don’t want to go back
to the hour I broke and ran, the broken
yolk and albumen shining in the toothed
bowls of the shell. I like to say
it might have been I who broke the contract,
as if it were not obvious